News

New Report Highlights Consequences of Late Payments

November 8 2017

Late payment culture is a blight on small and medium sized enterprises according to a new survey by Concur. The research, which quizzed the bosses of 1,233 UK businesses found that as a result of late payment, businesses had needed to make redundancies (7 percent of businesses), miss dates for salary payments (15 percent), and halt planned investments in the business (17 percent).

The scale of the issue was highlighted by the report. 73 per cent of the businesses researched were affected by late payments – 46 per cent on a monthly basis. Medium businesses were affected more than small business (63 per cent for medium businesses, compared to 49 per cent of large businesses and 40 per cent for small businesses).

Although it is often larger businesses payment practices that make the news, medium-sized businesses were also the worst for paying late themselves, perhaps reflecting their reliance on being paid on time to make payments to their own suppliers. 56 per cent of medium-sized businesses admitted to paying late at least once a year, in contrast to a figure of 47 per cent for large businesses.

Samantha White, CEO of My Credit Controllers commented:

"With late payment accounting for nearly a quarter of all business failures, the importance of managing your cash flow and collecting your payments from customers on time has never been more important. Fortunately best practice credit control can now be accessed on an outsourced basis, making it more available than ever before for businesses of all sizes."